


Some Enchanted Evening

by sorcxita



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-22
Updated: 2015-02-22
Packaged: 2018-03-14 13:25:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3412259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sorcxita/pseuds/sorcxita
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU where Harry is a failed boybander, Louis doesn't believe in fairytales, and fate brings them together anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Some Enchanted Evening

**Author's Note:**

> Just something light and fluffy :)

"Fuck," Louis says eloquently as he surveys the damage to the front of his car. The light of his phone is feeble but more than enough to illuminate the caved-in bonnet and the wheel only barely attached to the chassis.

Louis kicks the tyre disconsolately, and has to grab at the bent bodywork for balance as his foot slips from under him. That, he thinks grimly, would be the perfect ending to the night: breaking his leg or his arm or maybe his head, next to the wreckage of his crashed car, on a tiny little back road in the middle of a blizzard on a dark January night. 

He checks his phone again, out of hope more than anything else. Of course there's still no signal. Of _course_.

Louis looks around, a little bit of panic starting to take hold of him now. He has no idea how far he's come since he turned off the Woodhead Pass and the road he'd been travelling on hadn't exactly been overstocked with signposts. For all he knows he might have been driving back towards Manchester before he'd lost control on a hairpin bend and ended up with the front end of his car embedded in a drystone wall. It's pitch dark and he has no reference points at all, and the snow swirling down from the heavens is settling fast.

"Fuck," he says again. He is, he decides, probably going to die out here. 

And then maybe he isn't, because the darkness is pierced by the glare of headlights coming towards him. Louis weighs up the chances of it being some sort of roaming axe-wielding maniac against the chances of not dying of hypothermia and thinks he might come out ahead. He steps into the middle of the road and starts waving his arms and realises only slightly too late that standing in front of a moving vehicle on an icy and snow-covered road is perhaps not the best idea. 

He watches in fascinated horror as the big Range Rover slides slowly and with something like elegance into the wall next to his own car.

"Oh fuck," he breathes as glass breaks and bodywork crumples and something metallic makes a sad little dying sound.

It's very quiet and very dark when the engine cuts out. The sound of the Range Rover's door opening makes Louis jump.

“Hi,” he says intelligently. “Um, sorry about that?"

"Are you all right?" the other driver asks. Louis can't see him but he likes his voice immediately. He definitely doesn't sound like an axe-wielding maniac.

"I'm fine. Apart from, yeah, the car."

"Did you have an accident?"

Louis bites back on the instinctive sarcastic response. "Yeah. Just skidded off, on the ice. I was trying to warn you." The last bit isn't exactly the truth but he can live with that.

"Thanks," the other driver says, and it sounds genuine. "Should we ring the police? Or the AA?"

"No signal," Louis says. "Unless you have..."

"Right." He hears fumbling, and then there's the brief glare of a phone screen before it goes dark again. "I think my phone's dead."

"Oh good," Louis says with feeling. The snow is settling on his shoulders, reminding him that his jacket was £4.99 off the market and any claims of waterproofness are for advertising purposes only. "You don't happen to know where we are, do you?"

There's a brief pause, and then the other driver says: "No. I was following my sat nav. But I think it's lost. I'm Harry, by the way."

"Louis." Louis holds out his hand before he remembers that Harry can't actually see him. "Nice to meet you."

"It's snowing," Harry says, somewhat unnecessarily in Louis' opinion. "We should get inside."

"Do you think you can move your car?" Louis is half way through a gesture towards his own car when he realises the pointlessness of it. He thinks his brain might be slowing down with the cold. "Mine isn't going anywhere."

"Yeah- yeah, I can try," Harry says.

Louis folds his arms and tries not to shiver too violently as Harry gets back into the Range Rover. The engine turns over - a good sign - and the snow behind the car is washed red as the rear lights come on.

The engine note rises, the reversing lights come on ... and the Range Rover completely fails to reverse away from the wall. Louis sighs, and walks over to rap on the driver's window.

"I'll push," he tells Harry, when Harry puts the window down. In the glare of the instrument panel, Louis can see a little bit more of him: mostly hair and a luridly patterned scarf.

"Ok," Harry says slowly. "It's not moving though."

"It might do if I push when you reverse," Louis says patiently. "Just enough to move it, yeah?" And then, he doesn't add, you can give me a lift in your fantastic 4x4 that hopefully won't slide off the road. Again.

"Ok," Harry says again. 

Louis goes round to the front of the Range Rover. He pulls out his phone and uses the light of it to inspect the damage, wincing a little as he contemplates Harry's likely repair bill. But the tyres look ok, and they're pointing in the right direction, which is more than can be said for those on Louis' car.

"Ready?" he yells, putting his hands on the crumpled bonnet and adjusting his stance to get a better balance. The wall has partially collapsed and the icy stone underfoot is treacherous and the last thing he wants is to knock himself unconscious on Harry's car.

"Ok," Harry yells back, and Louis digs his heels in and pushes as hard as he can as Harry puts the car into reverse.

Nothing happens. The Range Rover rocks a bit - enough that Louis worries for a moment that it might come forward instead and flatten him - but it's well and truly embedded in the wall.

"Fuck," Louis says when Harry switches the engine off.

"I think we're stuck," Harry says, unnecessarily in Louis' opinion.

"Yeah." Louis cautiously makes his way around the front of the car. He's soaked to the skin and the snow is still falling and he's fairly sure the temperature has dropped at least ten degrees since he got out of his car. "We could try maybe digging out behind the rear wheels but-"

"I don't think that will do it," Harry finishes. "So what do we do now?"

Freeze to death, Louis thinks absently. "Wait until morning, I suppose," he says. His teeth are chattering so hard it's difficult to get the words out. "Hope someone else comes along."

"Ok," Harry says. "Get in then."

Louis blinks. "What?"

"Your car's all smashed up," Harry says reasonably. "And mine is, um, bigger."

"A ride-on _lawnmower_ is bigger than my car," Louis grumbles but Harry has a point so he goes back to his car just long enough to check that, no, he hasn't miraculously left a change of clothing on the back seat before returning to the Range Rover.

He slides into the passenger seat and shuts the door and the relief of being out of the blizzard and in the warmth - Harry has the air-con on full blast - is both instantaneous and overwhelming.

"You shouldn't have that on too much," he manages to get out. "Wear the battery down."

"It'll be ok for a bit," Harry says, and he flicks on the overhead light and Louis gets his first good look at him. And vice versa, he supposes - and by the way Harry's frowning it doesn't seem positive.

"What?" he says defensively. He knows he probably looks like a drowned rat. A hypothermic drowned rat.

"You're shivering," Harry says.

"It's fucking cold," Louis points out.

"And you're soaked."

"It's snowing," Louis says pointedly. 

Harry’s frown deepens, and then he’s reaching round into the back seat and Louis gets a lungful of the clean, heady scent of him and it’s too late to pretend to himself that he isn’t more than a little bit infatuated with someone he’s known for less than fifteen minutes. He thinks he’s managed to assume a neutral expression by the time Harry finishes doing whatever it is he’s doing and turns back.

Holding a t shirt.

“Put this on,” he says, offering it to Louis.

“I’m fine,” Louis lies. He’s not fine. He’s freezing cold and his wet clothes are like slabs of ice against his skin. “Seriously.”

“Your lips are blue,” Harry says, which Louis thinks is a bit of an exaggeration. “You need to get out of those wet clothes.”

“And that’s not even the worst chat-up line I’ve ever had.”

He freezes as soon as the careless words leave his lips: he doesn’t know Harry and the last thing he needs right now is to be thrown out into the blizzard if Harry’s the sort to take offence at that sort of thing. But Harry just smiles.

“It sounds like there’s a story there.”

“More than one,” Louis says with feeling. “You don’t want to know.”

Harry laughs, a short, barking laugh. Something about it is familiar; Louis’ seen him before but he just can’t place him. He takes the t shirt, trying to puzzle it out.

“You should get in the back,” Harry says. “There’s more room.”

Louis wants to point out that there’s more room in the front seats than there is in his entire _car_ but he just nods and scrambles awkwardly onto the back seat, narrowly avoiding kicking Harry in the face as he loses his balance for a moment. 

“Nice car,” he says, to cover his embarrassment.

“Thanks,” Harry says wryly. “You don’t want to know what the insurance is like on it.”

_Probably more than I earn in a year_ , Louis thinks. “Is it yours? I thought it was your dad’s or something.”

“No.” Harry sounds like he’s about to say something else but thinks better of it. “It’s- it’s mine.”

“Nice.” Louis pulls off his jacket with some difficulty and, for want of anything else to do with it, drops it to the floor. He’s half way through pulling his t shirt over his head when his brain helpfully supplies the memory of where he’s seen Harry before. “You were on X Factor.”

“Yeah.” Harry doesn’t sound surprised. Perhaps a little weary. 

“You’re famous.”

“Not really.” And now he sounds amused, which Louis will take over annoyed.

“No, seriously.” Louis starts putting on the dry t shirt. “You’re in that boyband. You were on BBC Breakfast. And my sister’s got a poster of you lot.” 

Harry laughs softly. “Is that the one where I’m squinting?”

“Yeah, could be.” Louis tugs the t shirt down and rubs his hands together. He’s still freezing. “See? Famous.”

“My mum likes us,” Harry says as he flicks the overhead light off again, plunging them back into darkness. “No one else.”

“Right,” Louis says, because he remembers now that things haven’t been so great for them lately. Not so much a crash and burn as going down with a whimper. Two singles that hadn’t exactly set the world on fire and a whole lot of publicity before they were very publicly dropped by their record company. It had made him feel a little bit better about not auditioning for X Factor himself, at the time, although he feels a little bit guilty about that now. He doesn’t envy Harry and his bandmates the cruel, vitriolic tabloid headlines and the paparazzi documenting every moment of their fall from grace. Sometimes the fairytale has a poisonous core.

Harry sighs. “It just didn’t- I don’t think it ever felt right, you know? Like a dream. Like there was something missing. It just didn’t, didn’t work out for us. Does that make sense?”

“Yeah,” Louis says with feeling, because he knows all about dreams and how insubstantial they are in the cold light of reality.

“Washed up at eighteen,” Harry says dryly. “That’s the thing about being _famous_.” He enunciates it like a curse word. “Whatever you go on to do, you’ll always be a failure in comparison. Are you still cold?”

“Yes,” Louis admits. 

“I can turn the heating up?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Louis glances out of the window. The snow is coming down so heavily he can see nothing else. “You’ll run the battery down. You probably need to turn it off.”

“We could freeze to death,” Harry objects.

Louis snorts. “Only the good die young. We’ll be ok. Farmers get up early. One’ll be along in afew hours.”

"We could be dead by then."

"You're a real ray of sunshine, you are.” Louis sighs and tries to curl himself into a smaller ball on the back seat. "Fuck, it's cold. These leather seats are fucking freezing."

"Sorry. They're only heated in the front." Harry hesitates for a moment, and then says, "Move over."

Louis opens his mouth to ask what the hell Harry thinks he's doing but then Harry starts to move and he realises _exactly_ what Harry is doing. He scoots over, trying to avoid a flailing arm and a wayward knee as Harry clambers into the back seat with him.

"There," Harry says with satisfaction. "Now we can keep warm."

"Oh good," Louis says faintly. He clears his throat, embarrassed. "Maybe we should set fire to my car to keep warm instead.”

Harry chuckles, and the sound buries itself into Louis's chest, a warm twist of _something_ that tugs at his heart, an instant addiction he never wants to overcome. "I don't think that's a good idea."

"So what are we doing now?" Louis asks. "Cuddling? Spooning?"

"If you like," Harry says agreeably, and there's another pause before he adds, "Sorry. I don't- I don't want to make you uncomfortable. Sometimes I just say things."

Maybe it's the cold, the anonymity of the darkness, or the forced intimacy of their physical closeness, but Louis feels reckless in a way he never has before, not like this, not with a boy he likes. He doesn't want Harry to be another missed opportunity, another simulacrum of what he really wants.

"Spooning is fine," he says, and he reaches out blindly, his fingertips grazing the back of Harry's hand. He feels the tremor against his own trembling fingers, hears the minute hitch in Harry's breathing over the pounding of his own heart,and sensesrather than sees Harry move towards him.The first touch of Harry’s lips against his own is tentative and soft, so fleeting it could almost be passed off as an accident. Except Louis isn’t prepared to let it go so easily, and he clings to Harry, holding his arm with one hand while the other grazes Harry’s waist and he feels rather than sees Harry smile.

“Spooning, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Harry kisses him a second time, and it’s better, easier, their tangled limbs fitting together like a puzzle that’s finally been solved, and there are so many things that Louis wants to say, so many strange and new emotions bubbling up inside him, thoughts and words and actions that might have been waiting for this moment, for Harry, to set them free, and maybe tomorrow, later, he’ll sort them though and make sense of it all, but what he says now is:

“I think the snow’s stopping.”

“Ok,” Harry says, and kisses him again, and it feels like the start of something wonderful.

 


End file.
